You Spin Me Right Round Baby, Right Round, Like a Record Baby..

A move worthy of Bubba Clinton.

The sharp fall in the number of US troops killed over the past three months has brought about a corresponding reduction in the political temperature back home. Rising concerns about Iran’s apparently hardening stance over its uranium enrichment programme have supplanted Iraq as the US’s chief foreign policy question.

The principal beneficiaries are John McCain, the erstwhile Republican frontrunner, who has loudly supported George W. Bush’s Iraq troop surge, and Hillary Clinton, whose vote in favour of the 2002 Senate resolution authorising war had been a bitter point of contention among grassroots liberals on the campaign trail.

“Until recently the conventional wisdom was that the 2008 election would be dominated by the Iraq war,” says Philip Gordon, fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research and policy organisation, who is advising Barack Obama’s 2008 bid. “But the situation in Iran is moving much more quickly and that is where President Bush’s decisions could have consequences for whoever takes over in January 2009.”

The fading of Iraq as a lightning rod is most evident on Capitol Hill, where Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, has all but abandoned Democratic attempts to force Mr Bush’s hand by attaching conditions to White House war-funding requests.

Mr Bush on Monday asked Congress for another $54bn (€38bn, £26bn) in supplemental war funding – bringing the total for this financial year to $194bn, or roughly $400m a day. Instead of promising new conditions, the Democrats announced they would merely delay Mr Bush’s request to authorise the money in coming weeks.

“Because casualties have fallen so far, it is futile to try to persuade moderate Republicans to vote with us to compel a withdrawal of US troops,” said a Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill.{...}

{my emphasis}

See, Democrats are moving away from Iraq not because the surge is working. Oh, no, no, no. It couldn't possibly be that. It's because fewer servicemen and women are dying at the hands of terrorists and they can't work their paltry majority into anything bigger without scores of dead and injured American troops. That's the reason why Democrats are abandoning the mission they were supposedly elected to achieve.

The question(s) of the day would be: do you think they realize that they just flat-out admitted their motives about supposedly "supporting the troops by pulling out" were completely bogus? Or do you think that one slipped by them entirely?

Posted by Kathy at October 24, 2007 10:38 AM | TrackBack